The entry visa is numbered 000073. No one visits Abkhazia any more, since the civil war the holidaymakers stay on the other side of the border, in the Russian town of Sochi. The border guard hands me a worn piece of paper.

It is a letter written personally by Foreign Minister Sokrat Jinjolia in ballpoint, in which he apologises for the 10 dollar border fee: “...introduced the fee to guarantee your safety.”

The cryptozoologists had only just left the Caucasus when the civil war erupted in the country of the snowmen. In March 1993 the 'Republic of Abkhazia', until then an Autonomous Republic of Georgia, declared its independence. It was only from the ruins of an Empire itself somewhat surreal that this phantom state could arise.

The free Republic of Abkhazia is not recognised by any other state in the world. It is being ruled by professor Vladislav Ardzinba, an expert on cuneiform scripts and the dead languages of the Orient. The cabinet consisted mostly of co-historians. They are highly educated men and women who have spent their lives studying the origin of the Abkhaz language in the 4th century BC and the outline of the first Abkhazian-Kartvelian Kingdom. The war has destroyed their 'Institute for Abkhaz language, literature and history', their libraries, ceramic finds and Habilitation records. Everything was taken from them. Thus they became politicians. The institute has taken over the direction of the state, the historians govern their research subject. At least whatever is still left of it.

The coquito palm trees along the coastal road have been perforated by bullets, the tea plantations and mandarin kokhozy are mined. The country appears empty as we enter the capital Sukhumi. Empty like the pillaged shops and factories, empty like the resorts in Gagra and the munition crates along the roadside. 200,000 people, half the population, are either out of the country or dead. Georgians have fled to the south, Abkhaz to the north, Jews, Greeks, Armenians to all four directions.

Cows have supplanted people. They are everywhere. Akin to an army of ghosts the animals occupy the main street, stand chewing next to petrol pumps or in the overgrown gardens of the sanatoria. A dumb chewing army of ghosts.

“The Georgians are gone. Thank the heavens. Now we are among ourselves. Only their cows have stayed.”, says Father Abwa. He admits that there must be more Georgian cows standing on the road than Abkhaz. For compared to the Georgians, Abkhaz formed a minority of 17 percent in the country that was named after them. To blame are Stalin's population transfers. And also the 220 annual days of sunshine. Here life was good. The offices of the entire Soviet Union were furnished with subtropical pot plants and house palms from Abkhazia.

Bograt Abwa owns one of the four remaining taxis of the Free State. The old man kranks his car forward past the impact craters, abandoned checkpoints and cows, all the while talking at his steering wheel. For three months he had searched for his requisitioned yellow Volga, until he found it with an Abkhaz unit: “I needed my taxi. So I offered the soldiers to drive them onto the battlefield. When they accepted, I wasn't sure whether I ought to rejoice.” Bograt and his taxi were present during the battle for Sukhumi and the artillery fighting along the Inguri River. His taxi survived. His friendship with Georgians did not.

Sukhum, formerly Sukhumi, is in a state of resuscitation.

Those who are young and alive sit squeezed into fast cars, screeching through the ruined city. The only license plate attached to some cars is the plaque from the ADAC [German automobile club]. Those who are old and not yet dead wait with their veteran insignia in front of the bread distribution sites or sweep the streets with eucalyptus branches. Many women wear black clothing. At first one thinks it the national costume.

For two years now the pensioners have remained pensionless. Their only comfort: the government cannot afford to pay itself salaries either. No one in this state gets paid. Not the garbage men, not the police en, not the teachers, not the soldiers, not the war invalids. And still the people work. Or they pretend to. They cut the flower beds of the Lenin street among collapsed walls or they sit behind a forced door fitted with a sign reading 'Minister for the Economy', contemplating a billion dollar oil terminal, for which “only an investor needs to be found”.

A city is being resuscitated. It resembles those brain dead patients whose bodies need mechanical ventilation, periodic turning and stirring, in the hope that, one day, they might open their eyes.

In Sukhum, previously Sukhumi, a city once called Dioskurias. Dioskurias, Greece's daughter, in whose bazaars Armenians, Syrians, Jews, later also Germans, haggled in all the languages of the Levant. For Abkhazia's figs, Georgian wine, pomegranates, tangerines and boxwood from Tquarcheli, which ships carried as far as Paris, for the construction of the Notre Dame. We wait, and whom we ask why all this had to be laid in ruins, tells us without a trace of astonishment about injustice that dead people perpetrated against dead people.

But why do stories exist? What purpose do the historians from the 'Institute for language' serve, who today govern Abkhazia (because the other elites prefer to do bizness in Moscow). They have contributed words and reasons to the fight between Abkhaz and Georgians. They sharply watched cultural nuances, worked out divergences in the costumes of the farmers in the mountains, pointed out ancient injustice. In their offices hang maps, covered in spots of Tipp-Ex, because the Georgians – “to destroy the Abkhaz identity” – attached an i to the end of every place name. Gone with the i.

Where did the injustice start for which Dioskurias had to be destroyed? With the Russian Czar, who after the conquest of Georgia tried to exploit its province Abkhazia as a buffer state? After the first Caucasian War, when the Abkhaz were driven away to Turkey? Difficult to say. Only the triggers are visible. The deeper causes are lost in the mists of history, just like the trail of the Almas, the mysterious snowman of the Caucasus, is lost in the cloud covered mountains of Abkhazia.